I must admit that I was wondering (last night) about parsing a .frm source into a different widget set and dialect of BASIC for direcrt use - just using VB as a form designer - thus allowing it to create cross-platform forms.

This is an example of using an OCX as an out-of-process server. in the form of a .exe file. I didn't have to register the OCX. Interesting note, you can't run out-of-process with .NET.

I'm leaning towards using out-of-process server OCX based forms with Script BASIC. They offer more flexibility but give up performance which isn't my concern with the applications I write. (accounting software)

I definitely can see using the VB IDE as a way to create IUP LED form definition files.

The only issue is VB is fixed position based and IUP is container based.

*nods*

Should still be doable - especially if you're like me, and use sub-frames as a part of the form hierarchy in VB.

It's really more about automating the donkey work of creating the form file instead of having to do it from scratch every time. Perhaps the VB code associated with the form could be used to generate whatever customisation is required - allowing a form to be modified without losing the IUP parameters that represent the tweaks used to make the change over seamless.

You could even include whatever validation and pre-processing routines you want - just as in standard VB - in order to generate a block of translated code for whatever target dialect you're after. Even C, Pascal etc.

The beauty of this is that it doesn't even have to be valid VB code, since you're using VB purely as an editor, and are never going to need to compile the form in VB.

Excel is a very popular OCX used by COM/OLE supported languages. I also use COM automation with Crystal Reports and QuickBooks desktop integrations.

I think building intelligent OCX application forms and connect to them via COM/OLE automation, (CallByName in SB's instance) the business logic is separate and in the language of choice. I really don't have much interest in using OCX form controls in a web browser.